Women who stress over work have more heart disease

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women with stressful jobs that offer little room for decision making and creativity have an increased risk of suffering a heart attack, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

While doctors usually focus on standard risk factors such as high blood pressure and cholesterol, the new findings show they might also want to ask about stress.

"We don't focus as much on stress," Dr. Michelle Asha Albert, a heart doctor at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, told Reuters Health. "Stress does cause a similar magnitude of risk as some of our additional risk factors."

Albert and colleagues followed more than 17,000 female health professionals over 10 years. There were 134 heart attacks, and women with high-strain jobs were 88 percent more likely than their less-stressed out counterparts to suffer one. They were also more likely to have heart surgery.

Job insecurity -- worrying about losing your job -- didn't seem to take a toll on the ticker, however.

The link between heart disease and job strain is already well established for men, but it hadn't been clear if it also held for women, the researchers note.

They presented their findings at the American Heart Association meeting in Chicago on Tuesday, and the data still haven't been vetted by independent experts.

"It is something everybody should be worried about, not just women," said Albert.

Although there still isn't much data on whether stress reduction works, she suggested that women who are stressed out at work try to be more physically active and develop a broader social network to cope with the stress.